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Anyone else read this piece and think it had the weirdest tone to it? I'm not sure I like either of them, though I respect some of their work. However, the fact someone sometimes say witty things when drunk does not prove them to be a genius; nor does being rude to waiters make them a rebel.

Also, they don't like puns, so they're clearly not worth bothering with.

I agree about the tone, there were a few passive aggressive disses that I thought seemed a bit out of place considering it was supposed to be a tribute. The last bit about agnosticism/atheism was weird too, it was almost like he's been reading the DiS social boards last week.

He hated interviews, publicity appearances, or even lecturing when he was a professor at Cornell. He preferred to let his books do the talking. In private, apparently, he was very warm, very funny, very down to earth (his favourite pasttime was watching football on TV with a can of beer - he used to be goalkeeper for his college) and very devoted to his wife.

He preferred to stay in his study and write or go out in meadows and study butterflies, rather than hang out at fashionable clubs and hand out cheap witticisms. This is why Nabokov was a genius, and Amis is not.

i guess i always feel a bit disappointed when i read things hes said but then i decide he was probably just a bit of a misanthrope and wonder if thats such a bad thing and his books are real good no doubt

I have no doubt he's staggeringly intelligent and tremendously well read. But it all amounts to a pile of beans unless you've created something worthwhile. At least Oscar Wilde wrote a handful of sporadically funny plays, a passable novel, and De Profundis. Hitchens may be an astounding rhetorician, as Amis says, but unfortunately that's a performance art that is hard to preserve.

He reminds me of one of my tutors at university - the cleverest man I've met, terrifyingly smart, a lethal conversationalist, a brilliant critic, but he's never produced anything of worth, which is a shame, but his own standards seem to forbid it.

so the fact that he's never produced a piece of classic literature is inconsequential (has he even written any fiction?). He's certainly played his part in the defamation of some high profile people, a legacy which he's probably happy with.

And it isn't that he hasn't produced any fiction that I'm questioning (De Profundis wansn't fiction), it's whether he has truly created anything at all. My issue was whether or not he can be said to be a genius, but to me, a genius by definition must create or innovate or discover. Does Hitchens do that? Can any critic do that? I think that yes they can - De Quincey and Hazlitt and Lamb and Barthes and Sontaag and plenty of others are critics first and foremost who I think created something or pioneered something - a mood, or a mode, or a different way of thinking. I'm just not sure Hitchens has done that much.

Hitchens is primarily a journalist, critic and polemicist. That he hasn't produced a bestselling novel or a successful play doesn't mean that he can't stand beside the likes of Pinter, and far above the likes of Amis, when it comes to 'greatness.'

I think he can be great without doing all these things. I'm just not sure he is.

As for a low opinion of my art, it comes and goes in waves... surely it's the same for architects? At one end, you can be sculpting monuments to last for aeons, at the other end, you're working out how big a windowsill should be to avoid overhanging guttering.

i can't quite tell if i think they're genuinely brilliant or if i'm just so pathetically admiring of their acutely self-aware*, swashbuckling literary larks. martin amis in particular, from reading his autobiography...he's as neurotic as me and the bumbler, and so i sort of warmed to him. and i find the relationship between him and the hitch very sweet.

but the things i admire/like them for aren't really the things i should like/admire them for. if that makes sense. i might as well just be liking a big brother contestant for their views on the world and the way they come across....because it's not like i really like them for what they have achieved professionally, having not read enough to really judge. if that makes sense.

that amis quote you keep going on about....'girls can sense the desperation dripping off you when you're going through a bad spell'....or whatever it was.

that's hit me hard that is, and i think it's also hit upon my/our problem. we DEFINITELY look desperate and fearful as fuck whenever we go out. we clutch at bars for dear life like we're stranded on a mountain and every beautiful girl is a potential rescue helicopter. and this is not attractive. basically, we need to be stallone and fucking own that mountain, cliffhanger style. or be the mountain. act like our dicks are mountains. we have to pretend that we have no fear and posses everest cocks. only then, when the girls fall for this beautiful lie, shall we find a warm bed.

basically, when you're on a night out, you act like a complete prick to random girls for no reason (and preferably make a scene in the process), just so the other girls think you're not desperate and mean business.

we could use it as a rallying cry. we howl RAOO!!!!! at the top of our voices and then punch the tits of the nearest girl next to us.

seriously mate, i think it's a winner. much better than this...'gosh, aren't i such a bloody charming loser' shit that i've been peddling for the last six years.

When he was crafting sweaty little novels about incest and similies and not making period romcom fodder for Keira Twice-A Knightley to pout her way through. I bet he was beating off doe-eyed admiring babes with a honey-glazed stick.

But seriously, we should definitely start a literary movement/wave/street gang. While trying out this RAOO malarky.

some people will put this down to a grammatical error, but you persist that it is actually a reference to derrida's idea of hauntology in which the present can only exist with reference to the past....in your case, the alphabet past in which 'a' represents the old world, and 'z' a new world in which history has ended.

wanna hear summit weird. last night i had a dream (i am so sorry for being a dream bore, but this is short and sweet) that i was watching stewart lee, and he got me up on stage and hypnotised me. and in my prone state, he asked me to think of three broadly existential authors. but he whispered false names into my ear and when i woke i gave the names of these spurious wordsmiths out loud until the audience laughed but then i looked up at lee and he smiled and stroked my hair and reassured me that this is what he wanted me to say.

I might just ignore the girls and start dating my own obnoxiousness. I'll burp, let it catch the wind, and smother my face in my own burpy air.

Seriously though...it could be good. I'm going to abandon ''spastic plastic-bag man'' and become a salacious heathen...abusing widows and spitting verbal atrocities into their porcelain faces. Tommorrow, I'm buying a mallet and a mane.

''I had a bad patch with girls in the early 1970s, which I never understood at the time, but what I learnt from it was that if it starts to go wrong, it’s like a fever you carry round with you and it becomes self-fulfilling. A lot of Philip Larkin’s poetry is about this conviction of unattractiveness; it’s as if all women can tell you feel unattractive and then everything you say is somehow slightly off.''

i'm just going to embrace the aspect of my personality i like to refer to as 'smugprick'.

he normally only comes out in the safety of comfortable surroundings with friends who know me well, but now i'm going to force the little bugger out for all evening-wear occasions until the girls are all bowing down to my hatefulness.

the other night, there was a moment with a girl i'd been tracking all night. we were both coming up to the door and did the 'oops, we both went the same way through the door' thing. at the time, i thought it most charming to smile and say sorry in a kind way.

as smugprick, however, i would've shot her a withering glance as if to suggest that she was a twat for even thinking she should attempt the door at the same time as me, and then, as she turns to leave, i'd throw toffees at the back of her head until she cries. fiver says after that behavior she'd be sucking my penis outside the local kebab establishment before you could trill 'treat em mean...'

as she'd be sucking my everest cock, i'd be squirting chilli sauce into her eyes and cuffing her ears with ribbons of sweating lamb. and this behaviour would secure me the first date and/or a bed for the evening.